John Stevenson reflects on the year that was for the Java community – focusing on the rise of certain languages, the best events and conferences of the year and his own personal highlights.

2011 was the most exhausting, crazy, fun-packed year I have ever
had in this amazing world of software development. Over the
last two years my community involvement has gone exponential, there
is just so much stuff happening in the UK.

I also started a new job thanks to this community involvement,
spoke and attended a bunch of great conferences, organised plenty
of events myself and learnt so much that not even all the TV I
watch over the holidays can wash it all away. Here are just a
few of the highlight of 2011 for me:

Community, community, community

There has been a huge rise in developer involvement with the
community over the last few years. In London alone we have
the largest Java user group in Europe and many other technical
communities have seen their members rise exponentially. Much
of this community activity is supported by the likes of SkillsMatter and Techub, community friendly
organisation.

These communities are usually driven by a handful of passionate
people who really invest a piece of themselves to make that
community fly.

Its not just individuals that appreciate the power of the
community. Atlassian created
an ambassador program this year to help technical communities
grow. The ambassador in each country reaching out and
encouraging aspirations of continually improving software
development, so it is fun and effective. Working in software
development can be one of the best jobs on the planet after
all.

Functional programming re-imagined

Just as BattleStar Galactica was successfully brought up to date
and made exciting for the modern times, so has functional
programming.

Scala has seen a huge adoption and London is a hotbed of
activity, both commercially and in the community. With its
powerful type system and amazing Akka framework for managing
concurrent state its easy to see the appeal for highly scalable
system development.

The Clojure language has helped bring lisp style language fully
back into fashion and unlike the Scala approch, Clojure encourages
a very powerful simplicty to software development.

This renewed interest in functional programming is encouraging
developers to think in different ways about their designs even if
they remain with a procedural language. One of the best
examples of thinking differently about design is the Disruptor from
LMAX, a highly scalable system with incredibly low latency all
written in Java.

2012 will definitely see more people getting in touch with
functional programming languages

Online persona more important than ever

With many top class developers getting new roles via the work
they do, lots of developers have been encouraged to share their
work. There have been many stories of companies headhunting
through open source projects.

With online DVCS repositories like Github and Bitbucket making
code sharing a trivial task, bravery is the only barrier to making
your development skills part of your online presence. Sharing your
own project is also a great way for people to get help work you are
doing and is an excellent opportunity to achieve more that one
person can alone. It worked for Linus Torvald after all!

There has also been growth in quality blogs from the developer
community, with writing on all aspects of software development,
politics, philosophy and human interaction. A very diverse
example is the LJCaggrityblogroller that pulls in posts covering
Java community process, concurrency, functional programming
and software craftsmanship.

Its also great that more people are speaking at technical
community events. Getting used to speaking is very valuable
when it comes to interviews and groups like the London Java
Community helping developers start public speaking via lightning
talks at their events.

Not forgetting all the Scala & Clojure coding dojos and the
range of diverse talks held through the year at SkillsMatter.

Getting real – understanding the business

There is a far greater appreciation by developers of what a
business needs really needs to be successful, much more than ever
before.

With startups this is almost a given fact, although even this
year there has been much more interest in the lean startup
approach, encouraging you to understand every aspect of the
business and measure how successful or not a decision has
been. An amazing exampleof this is the company called
Forward, who esentially build thriving web-based businesses from
ideas – investing in a business just enought at the right time to
explore the potential market and quickly ramp up if that market
takes off. Developers here typically deploy to production 25
time per day, working hand in hand with people who understand the
business potential and how to measure it.

This greater understanding is helping to drive the DevOps
community and make the whole of software delivery as effective as
possible.

John is the UK ambassador for Atlassian and active organiser of several communities in London. He runs workshops and speaks on technical topics including open source projects, developer tools, continuous delivery, TDD & BDD practices and declarative (functional) programming (Clojure). John also presents on kanban as a way to help individuals, teams and organisations become more effective. He is a strong advocate of group learning and encourages others to get involved with the community for their own personal growth.